Zoltán Balázs, director left basically the Hungarian traditions of performing when he put on stage The Tempest by Ostrovsky with the troupe of Maladype in the Bárka Theatre. From one side he stresses “the artificiality” of it, but from the other side he strengthens its ironic-grotesque and tragic parts.

It is artistic. It is artificial, man-made, formed, not natural, not created, it is constructed by us. At the beginning of The Tempest one character reminds us to the opposite of everything: the pictures of endless nature, that he “has been looking at it for thirty-five years”. Anyway, Judit Gombár’s set, all elements of it and Zoltán Balázs’ conception as a director can form the most artificial context in the Fencing Hall of the Bárka Theatre: a prolonged slope leads up to the top of the huge podium, under which there is an arcaded place, with expressively leaning columns, and there is a huge painted pastel landscape behind it with mountains. Into it a lamp, which can be moved on a long rack, lights the moon at the beginning, from which (and from the technicians who use them) there are more in the place, that way those who are under can move on real tracks of real carriages.

It is an artificial hall. It is an artificially formed world. It does not create an illusion, or if it does then we become the characters of this illusion too. We are the voyeurs of an imagined shooting, anyway we are the viewers of an opera performance, but the artificial side is there too, as the sound of music – unusually from Balázs – are given by speakers now, so that the music can wreathe around the forming drama in front of us. We can always hear as background music the parts of the opera, Katya Kabanova, which was made based on Ostrovsky’s work, as it connects to the play and gives its emotional charge and rhythm.

Have you ever thought about that the greatest cheat of film art, which can show reality the best, is the music itself, the music which is played in the background? Meanwhile all elements of the world of pictures are concrete, the music is the only tool that can raise you or pull you down into the objective reality. It works that way here too and creates the environment of a real costume film. (It is disturbing, but many times the slanting columns, the arc of the slide up, and sometimes the lights too show expressionist visions for us, and they refer to the approaching, overwhelming changing, to the real tempest: to the revolution.)

Then why are we in this place? Why do we have to get into – that way, unauthorized, in a spying way – wings of Hollywood to follow until the end this typical story of the XIX. century? Why do we need the mediation, the middle world of film and opera to get drawn the Ostrovsky-like fable about degradation of being?

Exactly for the reason why Balázs always gives a separate highlighted role for his viewer: always with different tools but the director always gives us a weird, outside, almost divine optic – it is similar to the table layer god-like waiter of Empedocles (Balázs Dévai), or the angel-like figure (Hermina Fátyol) who is hanging from above in The Blacks – I do not want to go on with it.

We face up with the same gesture in The Tempest too: the light masters with their whole presence with beams of their intelligent lamps on carriages put the actions into analytical lighting, almost Brecht-like quotation marks; The feeling of peeping in a film studio brings distance between us and the world of performance. Even more important from it that eyes of film can work in another way too, if the viewers are able to do an imagined movement to put their own eyes on the place of the close eyes of the camera, and able to see the picture of a future film in front of them at the same time – we can visualise really intimate premier plans and big totals which show over our realistic point of view, we can go closer or further from that point where we really watch the performance. This ghost like activity is offered for the viewers, the chosen stories or their sets, the solutions can change, anyway it seems to be the greatest characteristic of Balázs’ performances.

Ostrovsky creates the colourful veil of relationships to be able to tell vividly Katya’s story, the woman’s who escapes from an unhappy marriage to a secret relationship, then gets disappointed from it too and escapes to death. In the inner circle of the matrix of the roles there are the strict mother, her son (Katya’s husband) who depends on her, and cannot grow up, and the sibling of the husband (Katya’s ally), Varvara, opposite to her there is the lover Boris and his uncle, Dikov stands, with whom Kabanova has a secret relationship. The background characters have to show us the state of Russia which is going towards an explosion through the society of the town. While the pilgrim woman, Feklusha is the typical fanatic of the era, a woman Rasputin, Kuligin is the dreamer idealist, who megaphones of the technical and social progress.

Balázs strengthens the tragic-comedian and ironic – grotesque sounds of the play instead of the dark moody adaptation of a fate-tragedy like play as it has been treated so far. It can be seen the most in case of Kabanova, who is performed by Olga Varjú. The great woman with the actress’ performance is much closer to Arkadina in spite of her strictness than to Bernarda: the Kabanov garden is not a closed world on the level of sets and costumes, the terror of souls is much more cunning, as the keys are in the soul. The ermine fur in neck refers well to the fact that the constant training of her son and sister-in-law is not a rule of life but an evil perversion. Her relationship with Dikov is not moved by real desires, but the pure sexism; the actress is rigid like a statue when she dresses down to the love scene, and she does not leave the animal fur even at the moment. At the same time, it is ironically funny when she asks her son (in connection with her sister-in-law) in a fake naïve way: “If she is not afraid of you, how can she be from your mother?” Her lover, Dikov, who is made the same statue-like rigid version of himself by Róber Kardos, in an almost grotesque way, for a long time, with a weird smile stands in a pose at one of the arcades, then when he speaks in a stuttering way, he almost collapses as he is so drunken. Balázs Dévai speaks sensitively and chiselled in the role of the husband, his hesitant rebels are unsuccessful trials, they fall down like tepid waves. That scene is wonderful where the wife, who has already been afraid of the cheating, asks him not to travel: they finally come together in harmony, in a kiss, but the mother’s entrance ruins everything. Her son would step to her to say goodbye with a hug, but his mother forces him on knees, makes him a slave; he is made to kiss the edge of her skirt. Finally as the peak point of all evilness she forces without any intimacy, her son and daughter-in-law to kiss each other in public in an unhappy way. Dévai slows down endlessly the scene, but anyway he does everything. After the death of his wife he becomes really retarded, we can see him as a child: he is hanging from Kuligin’s shoulder as a heavy bag, and his figure articulates word by word his hopeless final message.

This kind of stylisation appears other places too, I have to tell it that this time Balázs does not make the actors do any exotic movements. The stylisation that remains in the performance indicates anyway the individual appearance of the characters, or the usage of the place require from the actors. It is important that no one can remain alone with their roles, the indiscretion of the eyes of films follow everybody, examine everybody from close, and judge them. The actors are moving between flashing lights, sometimes they turn directly towards the imagined camera or the source of light which watches their gestures. The most moving moment is when Kátya Tompos, who plays Katya’s role cannot remain alone even during the final moment. In contrary to the text she does not jump, but she slowly climbs down into the fatal river: she simply climbs down from the tallest point of the right side on metal hooks which are placed there, and she remains there attached to the side wall. In contrast to the others’ lively death as they are stuck into their characters she chooses the real one, meanwhile she is singing a wonderful Russian folk song on her mother tongue, as the only melody of the performance, and turns backward the film-like virtual reality.

In Renaissance iconography the swan is one of the important symbols of death. Kátya Tompos is a similar swan: her whole performance, her secret ballerina-like figure, her gaze away indicate that – as she lives through the situations of social connections in this non-worldly way, as she is lost in herself, in a meditated way, with her husband, with family (Kamilla Fátyol plastic formation to Varvara’ accomplice is a vivid loosening, but not a solution), and then leaves them with the help of the illusion of love, then to find her way to home in a song, on the invisible bank of rivers. It is strange as I can see her on the ladder, motionless, and I know that she is dead, anyway she is much more vivid than the others, the living real dead people, with their own meaningless recognitions; nothing has changed anyway, for the revolution they need a half century which is full of sufferings, they need another generation.

It can explain for me why do we miss the “title role”, why does not Balázs show us the – of course, basically symbolic – phenomenon (however we can see the lights of reflectors as long lights of lighting). To be more punctual: he shows it, but not the tempest, but the tense silence before it; with the role of Kuligin and Feklusha. The actors, who play these roles Artúr Kálid and Éva Bakos (Even Ádám Tompa, who in the role of Kudriash shows us a perfect ballet scene) present a much more dynamic, acting style of performance, than their partners who are stiffened in their static characters, motionless state of life, Artúr Kálid is the only one, who at least points out the fact: a person died. He will be the one, who gets Kátya Tompos down from the highness of the side wall, and lays the dead woman provocatively into the middle of the place. As he is carrying the couple, the vivid but childish Tihon and the dead Katya, he may feel that at least he gets the sin on himself, which he has not even done, and the fate from which he cannot get out: as an adult he realises his own situation. He show the Leonardo album at the beginning, the mentioning of the invention of the lighting rod is about the possibility of a more enlightened world in the pitch-darkness of mentality. Éva Bakos in the role of Feklusha is strange and wild, she forms a disturbing figure: she makes me remember not an old woman but a naughty child, as she is appearing from time to time from the hidden places of arcades: as she is running through the stage, as she is the frightening lighting herself, with which the lighting rod of clear sense could fight evidently. Her ominous sentences become real frightening because of these double meaning: in her ideas, on the opposite pole with Kuligin, the darkest tradition of the Russian past, the mysticism which is full of nihilism to confirm herself with Katya’s death: as I feel it, in the strongest performance of the actress a superstitious Puck mixes her invisible, but even more life-threatening lines. Zalán Makranczi, who plays Boris is rigid and rough unfortunately in a civil way, so he cannot give enough power to Boris. His feelings towards Katya seem to be clean, and his performance does not make clear when he has changed and escaped from the love. Hermina Fátyol as a servant is an empty bowl: her mistress always treats her as an object in a feudal way, she is a cloth doll when her mistress dresses down for love, she puts on her with malicious cruelty the regal clothes, the other times she rolls out of a cloth to make it possible for the Kabanovs to benefit from the clothes which have been made of her own “body” (understand that way: it is gained from her and her mates’ tormenting work).

Gábor Pap, Ellenfény, 2007

(translated by: Veronika Fülöp)